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Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories
Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories is a collection of short stories that Bram Stoker had written before his death. The stories are in public domain, and therefore are now free to read online."Dracula's Guest" full text at Inkitt List of Stories *"Dracula's Guest" *"The Judge's House" *"The Gipsy Prophecy" *"The Coming of Abel Behenna" *"The Burial of the Rats" *"A Dream of Red Hands" *"Crooken Sands" *"The Secret of the Growing Gold" Plot of Dracula's Guest A man, presumed to be Jonathan Harker, visits Munich before leaving for Transylvania. In spite of the hotel manager's warning not to be late, the Englishman leaves his carriage and wanders toward an abandoned village. When the carriage departs with the superstitious driver, a tall, thin stranger scares the horses at the top of a hill. When he reaches a valley, the weather takes a turn for the worse, and the man takes shelter. He soon realizes that he is in a cemetery, and finds a marble tomb, the tomb of Countess Dolingen of Gratz. Inscribed on the back of the tomb in Russian is: The dead travel fast. The man becomes disturbed to be here and is forced by the hail to shelter in the tomb. As he avoids the weather, the door of the tomb opens under him and a flash of lightning shows the interior and a "beautiful woman with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier". The force of the thunder throws him from the doorway as another lightning bolt strikes the iron spike, destroying the tomb and the woman inside. The Englishman's troubles are not quite over. As he painfully regains his senses, he suddenly has a warm feeling in his chest and a licking at this throat. He peeks through his eyelashes and sees a gigantic wolf with flaming eyes next to him. Military horsemen then wake the semi-conscious man, chasing the wolf away with torches and guns. Some horsemen return to the main party and the man after the chase, reporting that they had not found 'him' and that the animal is: "A wolf - and yet not a wolf". They also note that blood is on the ruined tomb yet the man's neck is un-bloodied. Stranger still, the Englishman later finds his neck pained when a horseman comments on it. When the man is taken back to his hotel by the horsemen, he is informed that his host, Dracula, had alerted his employees, the horsemen, of "dangers from snow and wolves and night" in a telegram received by the hotel in the time the man was away. Background Information Some scholars believe, based on evidence from Stoker's original manuscript, that "Dracula's Guest" was the first chapter from the original Dracula story, and that this chapter was later removed. However, others disagree with this idea, pointing to the absence of links between the two. References External Links *Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories on Wikipedia *Read the full text of "Dracula's Guest" at Inkitt Category:Dracula Category:Books Category:Media Category:Mediamass Category:Novellas